The PowerTower Pro line, from Macintosh cloner Power Computing,
introduced in the summer of 1996 were the machines that really
worried Apple and perhaps sealed the fate of Power Computing
and Mac cloning in general. Power Computing was consistently
beginning to beat Apple to the market with faster, lower cost
machines that garnering rave reviews from the Mac press. Though
nothing special in terms of esthetics, the PowerTower Pro
machines were basic, powerful and flexible work horses, aimed
right at the high -end market - where Apple's biggest profit
margins were. Apple eventually came the the conclusion that
Power Computing was much more interested in taking market
share away from Apple than in expanding the market in general.
Apple killed off cloning just as it was about to really take
off, putting an end to what it felt was largely a parasitic
relationship.

The PowerTower Pros use the same motherboard
that is found in the 9500s but were the first Macs to sport
the 604e PPC Processor. The 604e was the faster successor
to the 604 and has twice as much L1 cache as the 604. To take
advantage of the faster processor a 1MB L2 cache was included
with the machines. The PowerTower Pro machines shipped with
16MB of RAM which is expandable to 768MB in the 12 DIMM slots.
Memory is capable of interleaving for slightly better processor
performance. For graphics the machines had one of the fastest
graphics cards of the time, the IMS Twin Turbo, with 8MB of
graphics memory. The PowerTower Pros have 6 PCI slots.

The basic drive that shipped with the machines
was a fast 2GB 7200 RPM AV drive, however there was a RAID
option consisting of two 4GB drives which provided even better
performance for those that required it. The CD-ROM drive is
8X.

Below you will find the MacBench 4.0 results
for most of the processor upgrades available for this machine.
These results are what the individual manufactures publish
for their cards. In other words the speed trials were run
by the manufacturer. For an independent evaluation of these
cards check the Processor
Upgrade Page to see if we have results available. The
bar graphs below express results as a percentage of improvement
over the base machine, which receives a score of 100%. Further
down the page you will find a table with the actual MacBench
scores.